1 Exploring English post-apocalyptic landscapes on stage – a psychogeographic approach Tajinder Singh Hayer, Lancaster University A distraught astronaut beats the sand in front of a half-buried Statue of Liberty. A coma patient awakes and wanders the eerily empty streets of central London. Mutated gangs pillage through a vast nuclear desert. These are the familiar contexts of the post-apocalypse on screen. They feature iconic locales destroyed or transformed in to colossal memento mori. Or worlds where even those reminders have been scrubbed clean from the map leaving a landscape that is implacable; the nightmare that lies at the heart of Romantic notions of the sublime – a sight that threatens to crush the individual with its scale. These are the rumbling, widescreen vistas through which post-apocalyptic films can swoop. So why attempt to explore the genre through theatre? And why choose a city, Bradford, which does not automatically evoke the grandeur of a ruined London or New York? To contextualise a little, I have written a post-apocalyptic play set in Bradford; in this essay, I will consider how such altered landscapes can be approached on stage, and the way in which the genre can be realised through a psychogeographic research process. I will also consider how the idyll hovers throughout my own work and in other post-apocalyptic fictions, and the implications of this in terms of the English rural mythos. Post-apocalyptic markers – finding them on stage and finding them on foot North Country was performed and produced in 2016. It follows three characters – Nusrat Bibi, Harvinder Singh Sandhu and Jason Alleyne – through four decades in a post-apocalyptic Bradford. The first section of the play is set around a catastrophic
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1
Exploring English post-apocalyptic landscapes on stage – a psychogeographic
approach
Tajinder Singh Hayer, Lancaster University
A distraught astronaut beats the sand in front of a half-buried Statue of Liberty. A
coma patient awakes and wanders the eerily empty streets of central London. Mutated
gangs pillage through a vast nuclear desert. These are the familiar contexts of the
post-apocalypse on screen. They feature iconic locales destroyed or transformed in to
colossal memento mori. Or worlds where even those reminders have been scrubbed
clean from the map leaving a landscape that is implacable; the nightmare that lies at
the heart of Romantic notions of the sublime – a sight that threatens to crush the
individual with its scale. These are the rumbling, widescreen vistas through which
post-apocalyptic films can swoop. So why attempt to explore the genre through
theatre? And why choose a city, Bradford, which does not automatically evoke the
grandeur of a ruined London or New York? To contextualise a little, I have written a
post-apocalyptic play set in Bradford; in this essay, I will consider how such altered
landscapes can be approached on stage, and the way in which the genre can be
realised through a psychogeographic research process. I will also consider how the
idyll hovers throughout my own work and in other post-apocalyptic fictions, and the
implications of this in terms of the English rural mythos.
Post-apocalyptic markers – finding them on stage and finding them on foot
North Country was performed and produced in 2016. It follows three characters –
Nusrat Bibi, Harvinder Singh Sandhu and Jason Alleyne – through four decades in a
post-apocalyptic Bradford. The first section of the play is set around a catastrophic
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disease outbreak and its aftermath; the second section is ten years later; the third
section is forty years after the initial plague. The play is made up of interwoven
monologues and duologues, and is underpinned by a series of themes. It is about
communities forming and reshaping themselves in a time of scarcity – a recession
play in some ways (although that means something different in the context of a city
that never really recovered from the industrial decline of the 1970s and 80s). It is an
explicitly multicultural play (in a contemporary context where racism and jingoism
have been legitimised in some political discourses). It uses the post-apocalyptic genre
as a means of exploring cultural identity, exile and change; the shift from pre-
apocalyptic to post-apocalyptic society (from old country to new country) and the
questions of what is lost, what is retained, and what is changed hold a particular
relevance when placed alongside migrant narratives. Bradford, as a city associated
with European and Asian migration for more than a century, is, therefore, fertile
terrain for the genre.
I began this paper by positioning theatre as a kind of poor neighbour to film when
it came to representing post-apocalyptic ruin. I hope this was a pardonable rhetorical
strategy; in truth, theatre – with its oscillations between the literal and the
metaphorical – offers much to an sf writer. If one begins with stage directions, then
the meticulous scenarios of Beckett in Endgame, Waiting for Godot or Happy Days
create a postage stamp of the apocalypse – blasted heaths, gabbling mutations,
besieged homes, humans exposed to a hostile universe. We do not need to see the
apocalyptic desert stretching to the horizon; Beckett’s slice of the world and his
characters’ desperate/comic struggles do enough to intimate it. His notoriously precise
directions may close some avenues to collaboration, but there is still room for
different creative responses to his scripts. The collaborative nexus in theatre – the way
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that a play will be reshaped and interrogated in a production process involving actors,
directors, designers and other professionals – means that directions in a script can take
on strange unintended lives of their own. Writers can actively prompt creative
responses, can throw down challenges; consider, for example, the last direction of
Eldridge, Holman and Stevens’ A Thousand Stars Explode in the Sky – ‘The stars
begin to explode in the sky. It becomes incredibly bright, and then suddenly the whole
world is black’ (2010, p.112). There are more literal ways of responding to this cue,
but I would argue that a metaphorical approach yields a more interesting theatrical
experience.
To bring the discussion back to my own practice, North Country contains similar
challenges to a production team (for example, one of the penultimate scenes requires
an actor to punt on the surface of a lake in a ruined town centre). However, the play is
not set in abstract Beckettian geographies; it is rooted in a city that I grew up in and
attempts to extrapolate Bradford into a post-apocalyptic future. The ruined city was
very much inspired by the markers of industrial decline that had dotted my childhood
and adolescence – abandoned wool mills, stalled regeneration projects and
demolished factories. As a consequence, the play almost demanded that I explore the
region through a process of psychogeographic enquiry; the predominant
characteristics of which include
urban wandering, the imaginative reworking of the city, the otherworldly
sense of spirit of place, the unexpected insights and juxtapositions
created by aimless drifting, the new ways of experiencing familiar
surroundings.
(Coverley, 2006, p.31)
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A key psychogeographic text was Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True
Wilderness (Farley and Robert, 2011); a playful and melancholy exploration of the
abandoned corners of England. It is rooted in the post-industrial North and seeks to
restate the cultural worth of apparently marginal places. It brought moments of
personal recognition, and, crucially, reinforced the post-apocalyptic imagery that
coloured my own psychogeographic imaginings of Bradford:
We try to picture – in the post-petrol era – being able to walk the M1 Way,
from Brent Cross to Scotch Corner, leaving the gravitational pull of London
and its inner planet, the M25, on foot, staying overnight at service stations
reconverted into hostels. We mean, actually walk it; not use it as a loose
narrative device for some flaneurisms.
(Farley and Roberts, 2011, p.29)
This use of post-apocalyptic reverie is a psychogeographic intervention in its own
right; the type of thought experiment that Guy Debord might have used as part of the
‘Psychogeographical Game of the Week’ strand in the Letterist International’s
Potlatch magazine (Debord, 1981, p.6). Walking is as prominent a feature in the post-
apocalyptic genre as it is in psychogeography; see journeys in The Road (McCarthy,
2006), Riddley Walker (Hoban, 2012) and The Postman (Brin, 1986). The genre
presents an urban landscape defamiliarised, feral and rewilded. It destabilises the
boundaries between the city and the countryside (and emphasises the capacity for
wilderness in both). This is also there at the roots of psychogeography: for Baudelaire,
the city is ‘the great desert of men’ (Baudelaire, 2010, p.16). The flâneur arose
at a time when the city had acquired enough scale to become a landscape.
It could be crossed as if it were a mountain, with its passes, its reversals of
viewpoint, its dangers and surprises too. It had become a forest, a jungle.
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(Gros, 2011, p.176)
My dérives through the city would ultimately be mediated through a script-based
response rather than the more familiar prose, visual art or filmmaking approaches of
psychogeography. There are theatrical explorations of psychogeography: Lone Twin’s
Spiral saw the company transporting a table through the Barbican estate of London
(Gardner, 2007); the Wrights and Sites collective explicitly frame themselves as
walking arts practitioners and engage in lecture/performance dérives (Wrights and
Sites, 2013). There are also audio and app-supported walks that theatricalise the
spaces that audiences journey through: the Lancaster Dukes theatre’s Port Stories
which embedded recorded historical narratives at locations around the city (The
Dukes, 2017); Platform’s And While London Burns which created an apocalyptic
soundscape involving the City of London and climate change (Platform, 2006). The
wider contexts of site-specific theatre overlap with psychogeography’s terrain; they
both engage with space and ‘rely on the complex coexistence, superimposition and
interpenetration of a number of narratives and architectures, historical and
contemporary’ (Pearson and Shanks, 2001, p. 23). However, as a playwright rather
than a theatre maker/director/performer/producer, my first port of call would be the
script rather than a potential venue (although I did hope that North Country would be
staged in a sympathetic place in Bradford at some point). In one sense, my work was
responding to the ‘site’ that is the whole of Bradford; key locations appear in the play
as a result of their dramatic potential, their practical utility in a post-apocalyptic
context (for instance, their nearness to potable water), their autobiographical
significance, or their symbolic weight.
Post-apocalyptic idylls, ‘natural’ England and cultural heritage
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The destruction of human society can be used in post-apocalyptic fictions as a
framework for an idyllic, almost utopian return to ‘natural’ states. Either humanity is
brought back into a healthier relationship with nature or nature is freed by humanity’s
extinction; in both cases, one can see the urge to begin again being reaffirmed. The
apocalypse becomes an opportunity. I am conscious that the ending of North Country
(which sees a series of agrarian communities co-existing in the Borough of Bradford)
flirts with this trope; a trope which is imbricated with English and migrant nostalgias